At any minute the lasers and the music will stop. The lights will come up, and people will get to their feet. They'll slip into their hats and gloves. And the stranger beside me will find a drooly mess where her coat sleeve used to be. Me, I'll be sitting here with wet fur all around my mouth. Strands of fur still stuck between my teeth. Coughing up a mink hair ball.
My friends are elbowing me, still trying to pass me the stinking bandanna soaked in solvent. Carbon tetrachloride, another simple chemical. And the fur coat woman on my other side says, "Christ, what is that smell?"
As the last song ends, before the lights come on, I stand. I tell my friends we're going. Now. I'm shoving them out into the aisle. As the lights come up, I'm climbing over them, telling them, "Run. Don't ask questions, just get outside."
Of course, they think this is a game. So we're running. Outside the fire exit doors, the acres of parking lot are dark, and it's started to snow.
With the snow falling in fat clumps around us, we're running. Through Washington Park at night. Past the zoo and the Christmas lights on the big mansions, each spot of color smearing. Trailing. We're running through the rose garden, the downtown stretched out below. And my friends are laughing. Their fingers and faces stinking of chemical solvent, they run through the falling snow, not thinking this is anything but fun.
Quests: Adventures to Hunt Down
Each of the following is a real trip—minus the risk of flashbacks. Make the effort and live a few hours in somebody else's world. Here are fourteen local outings that prove no way do we all live in the same reality.
I. The Self-Cleaning House
The sign on the gate says do not step on the poison ivy or feed the bull and it's not kidding. That, and the Great Dane, Molly, will rip out your throat.
This is the world-famous Self-Cleaning House, designed and built by Frances Gabe, an artist, an inventor, and a great storyteller. Here in her house the walls are concrete block, with entire walls made of special blocks mortared sideways so the hollow cores form little windows. Sealed on both sides with Plexiglas, the windows hold small knickknacks you never have to dust.
Some open blocks in the wall are glazed with amber glass, giving the rooms a golden honeycomb light. A beehive feeling. "The light ought to go from one side of the house to the other," Frances says, "clear through."
One door is a solid slab of casting resin with slices of bark sealed inside. Frances was so in love with the red-purple color of the local poison oak, she tried to mix paints to match it. She never could, so she tried to save it by casting it inside resin. To her disappointment, the resin turned the bark black.
To clean the house, you just turn on the water to a spinning spray head in the center of each room's ceiling. You add soap through a stint in the plumbing. The wash and rinse water run down the sloped floor and out through the fireplace. You turn on the heat and blower to dry everything. In the kitchen, open work shelves allow all the water to drain through to the floor. A hatch in the wall channels trash down a chute to the garbage can. Clothes are washed and dried as they hang on hangers hooked to a chain that pulls them through each process in a three-part cabinet. The first part is a washing closet, the middle third is a dryer, the last third is the storage closet where the clothes wait, ready to wear.
Frances chose concrete block to dissuade termites, carpenter ants, and gophers. "They're all looking for living quarters and they'd be very happy to share mine with me." Despite the concrete, a chipmunk keeps getting in to eat her bananas.
The walls are covered with paintings and pencil sketches Frances has done, all of them waterproofed to protect them from the overhead soap and water sprays. The floors are sloped a half inch for each ten running feet. The only item that's not waterproof is a rug on the floor that has to be rolled and set aside when the room is washed. The house has withstood two earthquakes, three floods, and the hurricane of the 1962 Columbus Day storm.
Framed on one wall is a U.S. government patent for the Self-Cleaning House. "It was the only patent of its kind the government ever issued," Frances says. "Instead of a single sheet, this is like a book." Behind the top sheet there are twenty-five different patents for different aspects of the house.
Today she wears a bright red sweater and slacks, and black-framed glasses. Her gray hair is curly and short. She walks as little as possible, moving from chair to chair, to finally a wheelchair that lets her move around her studio, from her drafting board to her desk to a half dozen other projects. Molly, her Great Dane, is always beside her.
Born Frances Grace Arnholtz in 1915, she went to eighteen different grade schools, moving around with her father, a building contractor. "I was born a most unusual person so I had a heck of a time in school," she says. "Everything moved much too slowly. My last day, I stood up in class and screamed at my teacher, 'You told us that last week!'"
She adds, "I just wanted to get an education and get out of there!"
Frances graduated in 1931, at the age of sixteen. At seventeen, she married Herbert Grant Bateson. "He was six-foot-two and I was five-foot-two, and we got kidded a lot," she says. "He was a building contractor, and I was my husbands boss."
After their divorce she changed her last name to Gabe, a name she invented using the first letters of her middle name (Grace) her maiden name (Arnholtz) and her married name (Bateson). She explains, "I added the E to keep it from being 'Gab.'"
The hearth of her bedroom fireplace is paved with hand-cast tiles, printed with her initials, F.G.A.B.
In the 1940s she designed her self-cleaning house and toured the country with a model. It's just returned from a two-year loan to the Women's Museum in Dallas, Texas. "Now," she says, "people are yelling for floor plans for the model."
To see her self-cleaning house, drive south on Interstate 5 through Portland to the Newberg exit. Then take Highway 99W south through Tigard to the town of Newberg. At the far side of the small downtown area, look for the traffic light at Main Street and turn left. Follow Main through another light and a stop sign, where it becomes Dayton Avenue. Follow Dayton Avenue until it crosses a bridge over a ravine. Take the first right turn, onto a gravel road, and veer to the right. The Self-Cleaning House is the last house on this road. But—and I cannot stress this enough—call first! The number is 503-538-4946. Be polite and expect to negotiate a small fee for your tour.
Sitting in her studio, with the wide windows looking down into the canyon of Chehalem Creek, Frances Gabe works on more floor plans for her famous house. "In high school," she says, "my psychiatrist told me, 'You're many times over a genius. The world belongs to you, and don't let anyone tell you anything different.'"
2. House of Cunt
Forget the Vagina Monologues. This three-woman, two-man theater troupe has gone from parading the street in nothing but G-strings made from human-hair toupees to opening for the Oregon Ballet. Wherever you find them, they'll be pushing the envelope with their experimental comedy and music.
3. Volcano Basketball
On Portland's east side, Mount Tabor, Mount Scott, and Rocky Butte are all volcanic vents left over from the last eruptions of now dormant Mount Hood. Until the next eruption, an asphalt basketball court on Mount Tabor fills the dormant crater.
4. Adult Soapbox Derby
Every August, grown-ups race their homemade cars down the steep slopes of Mount Tabor. Cars crash. People are hurt. And someone wins. It's a blast. Look for the preliminary race around August 10, with the finals two weeks later. Or hang out with the racers at the sponsoring bar, Beulahland, 118 NE Twenty-eighth Avenue. Phone: 503-235-2794.